Network Security And The Internet - 1517 Words

The world is more connected now than ever since the birth of the Internet and with the new networking technology coming out, will continue this way. There is a large amount of personal, business, and government information on the internet and network infrastructures. Network security is becoming of great importance because of the attacker s ability to steal this information that can be easily acquired through different means of attacks. The internet itself along with network infrastructures has many security risks in it. Knowing what attack methods are out there allows users a chance to defend against them. Learning about the history of the Internet along with network attack and defense allows users and anyone operating within the digital†¦show more content†¦Knowing this information will help any user or organization build a standing defense from an attack. Malware dates back to the 1960s. The systems were slow, and computer use was rationed among different groups of users. Students were often the last ones to be able to use the internet so they invented tricks such as writing computer games with a Trojan horse inside to check whether the program was running as root, and if so, created an additional privileged account with a known password. By the 1970s, large time-sharing systems at universities were the target of pranks involving Trojans. In 1984, a classic paper by Thompson in which he showed that even if the source code for a system were carefully inspected, and known to be free of vulnerabilities, a trapdoor could still be inserted. His trick was to build the trapdoor into the compiler. If this was recognized that it was compiling the login program, it would insert a trapdoor such as a master password that would work on any account. So the next step is to see to it that, if the compiler recognizes that it’s compiling itself, it inserts the vulnerability even if it’s not present in the source. So even if you can buy a system with verifiable secure software for the operating system, applications and tools, the compiler binary can still contain a Trojan. The moral is that you can’t trust a